Alan Craik Series

From Rules of Engagement to Hostile Contact, Gordon Kent has captivated readers with novels that combine authentic portrayals of global secret operations with the passions that go with them: the yearning for family and peace, the deceptions of agents in the field, and the extraordinary risks the bravest and best will take for a cause. His new suspense novel is vintage Kent: a heart-stopping tale of a terrorist strike, its explosive aftermath, and the struggle of special agents in a battle that is reshaping the globe.

To Americans, the scene is agonizingly familiar. The mangled steel of a U.S. warship in a foreign harbor. The revolving loops of CNN footage and faraway streets strewn with debris. But for Lieutenant Commander Alan Craik, the terrorist attack on the USNS Jonathan Harker is part of the job. Fighting terrorism from Pakistan to the Far East, Craik reacts to a spontaneous horror with calm action. But an enemy Craik doesn’t know has carried out the bombing in the teeming port of Mombasa, Kenya—for reasons he cannot guess.

While Alan Craik finds himself in the middle of a scene of carnage, his wife, Rose Siciliano Craik, is fighting her own battle, proving her flying prowess, rising to astronaut training school in Houston while trying to hold her family together. Now she herself has been forced to accept around-the-clock protection from NCIS—the Navy Criminal Investigative Service. NCIS special agent Mike Dukas, Rose and Alan’s friend, is playing it by the book. But he’s also playing his hunches. Dukas thinks it might not be coincidence that Craik was in Mombasa when the terrorists struck—and that a sniper was using the cover of chaos to take a shot at Craik himself.

As agents scramble around the world to find the planners of the attack, and another bomb goes off in Cairo, Craik, his wife, and their friend are at the center of the storm. And as each makes fatal choices, they begin to sense that the fight they’re in is not the kind they’ve planned and trained for—and that whoever is behind the devastating Mombasa terrorist attack may be coming relentlessly after them.

With twists as harrowing as a high-g-force turn, Hostile Contact is vintage Gordon Kent: an electrifying blend of military suspense and espionage thriller. In it, Navy intelligence officer Alan Craik returns to action, strapping himself in for a wild ride into a dangerous, borderless realm of spies, counterspies, and high-tech warfare on both sides of a potentially lethal conflict–between China and the U.S.A.

Hostile Contact

When Alan Craik and NCIS agent Mike Dukas spearheaded a hunt for a traitor inside the CIA, they landed in the middle of a firefight–and made some very powerful enemies. Inside Washington, some still worship the arch spy Craik and Dukas took down–and now these men are plotting their revenge. With their expertise in counterespionage, Craik and Dukas have been lured into an operation that will put them in contact with the Chinese, an operation with only one real purpose: to destroy them both. But while they know better than to take anything at face value, Craik and Dukas cannot guess how another player will shape the game. Their contact in Jakarta is a Chinese double agent walking a high wire between his handlers, as the Chinese search for a mother lode of money lost on the covert battlefield.

Craik is also holding down his day job, flying a sub hunter S-3B crammed with high-tech gear off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Along with his astronaut-to-be wife, Rose, Craik and his team are acting on intercepts of a “ghost” radio whose purpose they can only guess. Craik’s expertise in intelligence tells him to start searching for an unseen, unknown submarine that may be lurking off Whidbey Island–with the ability to strike a death blow against the Navy’s most important missile-loaded subs.

Suddenly Craik is thrust into a secret war raging from the heart of Beijing to the depths of the Pacific, as espionage and sub hunting come together in a chase to rescue a Chinese defector and his family, while a U.S. Navy carrier group is threatened by hostile suicide boats acting on targeting information from a submarine.

The Alan Craik novels have earned GORDON KENT electrifying praise for their breakneck pace and raw emotion, as well as for some of the most remarkable heroes–and villains–in fiction today. Now U.S. Navy Officer Craik is back in action, all because one man, fueled by anger, ambition, and pain, has ignited an explosive chain of events that threatens not only two good careers, but world peace itself….

TOP HOOK

It’s springtime in Newport and Alan Craik and his wife, Rose Siciliano, are on top of the world. She’s headed for astronaut training; he’s going into an espionage school. Parents, pilots, lovers, and loyal navy officers through and through, the husband-and-wife team are eager to take the next step. Then it all comes crashing down.

In a Virginia suburb of D.C., a senior CIA man has committed a series of clandestine acts that have led him into the most dangerous place he has ever been. Now George Shreed’s dark secret is in danger–and a woman is demanding a million dollars in exchange for her silence. Shreed’s next desperate move is to find someone to take the blame for the information he himself leaked. The fall guy will be a woman: Rose Siciliano.

Suddenly, an investigation targets Rose, and, by association, her husband, Alan. And as a circle of treachery tightens around them, events race out of anyone’s control. In command of an airborne unit on the USS Thomas Jefferson in Trieste, Alan is contacted by the same woman who is blackmailing Shreed. Soon he is being pulled into a vortex of spies and counterspies while a series of stunning escalations take his high-tech airborne attachment–and the world–to the brink of war.

In the most dangerous region on earth, Alan Craik is crashing through forbidden airspace to find a spy, code-named “Top Hook,” whose act of betrayal is more complex–and chilling–than anyone can guess.

From the deafening roar of jet fighters launching off an aircraft carrier to nerve-shattering clandestine meetings in Turkey, North Africa, and Pakistan, Top Hook is a relentless turbocharged ride–and the best work yet from the most original writer in military adventure today.